Odometer not working, even with new gears

[ak96ss]

Friend of mine has a 1991 318i with a non-functioning odometer. We pulled the cluster and found that one of the gears was missing a few teeth, so we installed new gears from odometergears.com. Reinstall everything, it is still not moving. I tested the gears when the speedo was out, everything turned and moved like it was supposed to, and I blew it all out with a can of air, so there are no little bits left in there. All other cluster functions are working fine, the speedo works fine.

What's the next step, just replace the speedo entirely? I found the thread here that talks about replacing capacitors and calibrating speedos, and I don't have a means to do those tests - I have a lot of tools but no signal generators or oscilloscopes... :)

With $60 in new gears in that thing I'd like to get it to work the way it is supposed to...

[liquidgroove]

My old cluster had all working gears, but it was not moving. I reflowed all solder point and in the process, I found a thin copper lead wire loose. Solder that wire back cured the problem.

Perhaps you could reflow the solder point and check if wires were loose?

[ak96ss]

Good idea - I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

[twright]

The traces on the circuit boards on these clusters go bad fairly often. The good news is that, with patience, you can find the bad trace and just solder a piece of wire in its place.